It is often necessary to condition materials for transport to a facility that uses such material in a commercial process such as power generation, manufacturing, and recycling. Often times such materials contain impurities making it necessary to chop up or pulverize to separate the wanted material from the impurities. In some situations such materials are used plastic containers that need to be conditioned into a more condense form.
One area in particular where a device is often needed to “condition” materials relates to the recycling industry. Recyclable materials include many kinds of glass, paper, metal, plastics, textiles, and electronics. For example, plastic containers are often recycled. Unfortunately, such plastic containers are often more bulky than necessary and may contain unwanted material (such as fluid, dirt, etc.). To assist in making the process of recycling plastic containers more economically feasible, the plastic containers need to be preconditioned to extract the wanted material from the unwanted material. The present invention is a pulverizing/shredding machine well suited for such a purpose.
Prior art pulverizing devices are known such as the machines manufactured by Remcon Equipment, Inc. While such a device works well for its intended purposes, it has its issues. First, Remcon's fingers are curved and spring loaded which allows large pieces of material to pass thereby compromising the effectiveness of the preconditioning process. Second, Remcon's device uses a drum with flat ends that allow material to get trapped between the drum end and the drum housing. Third, such prior art devices need a second row of substantially stationary teeth to better shred the material to be recycled in to smaller pieces than can be easily achieved with only one row of teeth. Forth, such second row of substantially stationary teeth should be easily taken out of the system to allow for bigger pieces of recycled material as required by the recycler.
The invention address all the above described deficiencies in the prior art.